


Why Can't I Come Down?

by frikey



Category: Panic! at the Disco
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe, Angst, Drug Addiction, Drug Use, M/M, Past Relationship(s), Past Ryan Ross/Brendon Urie, death mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-03
Updated: 2016-04-03
Packaged: 2018-05-30 21:04:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6440596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frikey/pseuds/frikey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"6 AM, there goes the moon<br/>I feel like death is coming soon and, oh<br/>All I wanna do is fuckin' sleep."</p><p>In which Ryan's life is spiraling out of control.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Why Can't I Come Down?

**Author's Note:**

> Based off the song Bath Salts by Highly Suspect (that's where the title and lyrics come from). This is pretty dark (and kinda vague, but it's supposed to be); hopefully I tagged it appropriately. Let me know what you think. xo

Ryan hardly knows anybody at this party, but he doesn’t mind at all. He doesn’t know the names of any of the people who keep pressing against him, trying to dance with him in the middle of the darkened living room—Ryan isn’t sure whose living room it is—but he doesn’t mind that much either, so long as the red solo cups full of god knows what don’t stop making their way into his hands.

Ryan is high, but that’s a more than common occurrence these days. It’s somewhat of a running joke between his friends—it’s not a question of whether or not Ryan is high anymore, it’s just a question of what drug he’s chosen on that particular day. Ryan knows that should be his wake up call, his sign to sober up and get his shit together, but he doesn’t care enough about his life or what happens to him to do that. The drugs make him forget.

The drugs do a decent job of silencing the voices in Ryan’s head, and that’s all Ryan can really ask for here lately. He doesn’t have the right to ask for anything else.

“Hey, man, you feelin’ okay?” a voice comes from somewhere beside Ryan, and he turns to look for the source. He spots a dude he’s never seen before in his life standing rather close to him, watching him with a slightly worried look in his eyes, and Ryan deduces that the voice must’ve come from this guy, this guy who kind of looks like a tweaker, somebody worse off than Ryan is himself.

“Yeah, I’m good,” Ryan replies, and his words come out slurred. He laughs hysterically at the sound.

“You just look kinda spaced out,” the mystery dude explains, “Do you know where you are?”

“No idea,” Ryan laughs, tilting his head back and downing the last of whatever’s in his cup. It’s sickly sweet, and Ryan cringes as it burns down his throat.

“Do you know what you’re on?” The guy asks, eyeing Ryan reproachfully.

“Do you know what _you’re_ on?” Ryan shoots back, giving the guy what he hopes is an icy glare, before crushing the empty cup and throwing it in a blackened corner of the room. He turns on his heel and starts to weave his way through the crowd of people, most of who are just as drunk and high as he is.

Is he spacing out? Maybe.

To be truthful, he has no idea what he’s on. Some dude offered him something when he came in and he took it, but not before making the dude promise it wasn’t meth or bath salts. Those were pretty much Ryan’s only limits.

He’s been thinking about Bren again. He’s been thinking about him a lot. The boy haunts his dreams, even when he goes to bed high. Ryan hears his voice in his sleep, feels his lips on his skin and wakes up gasping and hard in the middle of the night, sweat rolling down his back as he kicks away his tangled sheets. The drugs aren’t helping with that problem anymore.

But at least when he’s awake, they keep the voices at bay. They keep the thoughts trapped in the far recesses of his brain, and Ryan supposes that’s all he’s allowed to ask of them. Stupid substances. Stupid dependency.

Fuck.

He is totally spacing out.

He’s standing in the middle of the kitchen now, the ugly, cramped kitchen with atrocious wallpaper and sticky linoleum floors. There’s a much smaller group of people congregated in there, drinks in hand, and one guy is bent over the counter, snorting what looks like a line of coke. The others are staring at Ryan, who realizes he must’ve been staring back for a while now, only his eyes have been unfocused and he hasn’t been looking at them at all.

“You okay, man?” One dude asks, clearing his throat uncomfortably.

“Yeah, yeah, ‘m fine,” Ryan mumbles, his words still slurred, only it’s not as funny this time. “Just need some fresh air.”

Ryan heads for the sliding doors on the other side of the room and quickly pushes them open, the cold night air smacking him in the face and momentarily stopping him in his tracks.

When did it get so cold out? He could’ve sworn it was warm when he got here.

Fuck.

 

Later, when Ryan is laying in his bed all alone, the voices start up again.

This scares Ryan, because he’s pretty sure he’s still high, but he can’t ignore the voices speaking loud and clear in his head.

 _You’re worthless,_ they whisper. _You’d be better off dead, and everybody knows it but you. The sooner you accept it, the better._

Ryan throws the sheets off his aching body and hauls himself out of bed. The alarm clock on his nightstand reads 2:03 AM.

Ryan won’t be sleeping tonight, and he knows it.

He wanders through his house in nothing but his boxers, trying to remember where he stashed his last eight ball of coke. Or where he hid his last bag of heroin, but he really doesn’t feel like fucking with heroin right now. Not tonight.

Ryan finds the coke after a few minutes of searching, and he dumps enough for a couple decent lines on his coffee table.

 _You’re kinda pathetic, Ross_ , he thinks before snorting the lines up his nose in quick succession.

Ah, fuck.

An hour later, when Ryan is once again back in his bed, he starts to worry that maybe it’s not quite normal for him to feel this fucking cold when he’s underneath so many blankets. He’s shivering, and his toes and fingers are numb and useless. He holds his hands out in front of his face and flexes his fingers, wondering with a halfhearted curiosity what the fuck is wrong and why he can’t feel the movement in his hands despite watching it take place.

Huh.

His muscles are spasming aggressively, the ones he can feel, anyway, and he’s pretty sure his eyebrow is twitching faster than it used to when he and Bren would fight, but he’s not one hundred percent certain because he can’t feel his goddamn face. Oh well.

Ryan is pretty sure he’s dying, but the thought doesn’t bother him too much. At least the voices are silent, and that’s something he can take comfort in. He stares at the wall of his bedroom in the dark, wondering what his life would be like if he could’ve somehow convinced Bren to stay.

Would they be cuddled up together right now? Warm and enveloped in a post-coital sleep, limbs entangled and noses touching?

Ryan thinks they would be. Bren was always a fucking sucker for cuddling, a damn clingy sleeper, and Ryan never had the heart to tell him no. He thinks that probably wouldn’t have changed.

“Oh fuck,” Ryan whispers in the dark, his voice shaking and his breath coming out ragged. “Why can’t I come down? Why can’t I come down, Bren?” Ryan drags his hands down his face in an attempt to gain some composure, but it’s useless because he can’t feel either of the aforementioned body parts. It feels like his arms ends at the wrists, where his tattoos peek up at him mockingly, and like his torso ends at the base of his neck, like he doesn’t have a fucking head at all.

“I’m so fucking cold,” Ryan whispers brokenly, wrapping his arms around himself and fixing his eyes on the landscape outside his window. It’s still dark outside, and Ryan can’t make out much, but the darkness comforts him. It reminds him a lot of what must be going on inside his body, inside his head.

This must be what his inner turmoil looks like.

5 AM comes and goes, taking the moon with it, and Ryan watches with glassy, unfocused eyes as the sun makes its slow ascent into the sky outside his bedroom window. The voices are back, but Ryan is sure he hasn’t come down from his high yet, because he forced himself out of bed and took more drugs not even an hour ago, which means they just aren’t working anymore.

The drugs aren’t fucking working anymore, and Ryan is sure he’s dying.

There’s no way he’s going to make it out of this one alive, no way in hell he’s going to survive this. He’s pumped way too much into his body. He can almost feel himself shutting down.

Maybe he’s just hallucinating. Maybe this is just some crazy side effect of the shit he took at the party all those hours ago. He still has no idea what it was, after all.

But no, Ryan is pretty sure he’s just fucking dying, and the thought doesn’t scare him like it should. The thought hasn’t scared him in a long time. Brendon took everything Ryan deemed worth living for when he left, and Ryan hasn’t been scared to die ever since.

He has no desire to get up and call an ambulance for himself. He knows the hospital is the best place for him right now, that the doctors could save him if he really is dying, but he has no desire to give them the chance to.

It’s better this way.

Ryan closes his eyes when they get too heavy to hold open, curling in on himself underneath the blankets.

“All I wanna do is fuckin’ sleep,” Ryan mutters to himself, his limbs feeling increasingly heavy by the second. He isn’t sure how long he lays there like that, barely conscious—or maybe he’s _un_ conscious, maybe the drugs have finally knocked him the fuck out and he’s dreaming—before he hears it.

“Oh, Ry,” comes the voice from somewhere above him, barely a whisper, and he tries to snap his eyes open, but they’re too heavy. Or maybe he did open them, and there’s nothing but darkness around him anyway. Ryan really isn’t sure.

He feels a hand on his face, caressing his cheek as warm breath tickles his neck.

“Oh, Ryan. What have you done?”

It’s Brendon’s voice, and Ryan is pretty sure he’s hallucinating at this point, and he’s almost certain that he’s fucking dying, but he figures it can’t be too bad if Bren is there with him.

“What have you done, Ryan? What have you done to yourself, angel?”

Not bad at all.


End file.
